"...out of the splendid house which was not so much a house as a vast piece of space partitioned off from the universe and decorated partly for beauty and partly to make our privacy more insolent, out of the garden where the flowers took thought as to how they should grow and the wood made as formal as a pillared aisle by forestry, may be judged from my anguish in being left there alone."

Even without context this sentence is delectable, and West in her first novel treats us to 90 pages of delectable prose. No detail is too insignificant to be treated with careful, deliberate beauty.

Published at the close of WWI and one of the first works to examine shell-shock (what we would contemporaneously call PTSD), this short book is still powerful a century later, and a much easier read than Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.